How to View Google Analytics for My Website

Viewing your Google Analytics data for the first time is simpler than it seems. Once you get past the initial setup, you can quickly find the answers to burning questions like "where are my website visitors coming from?" and "what are my most popular pages?" This guide will walk you through accessing your Google Analytics dashboard, understanding the most important reports, and making sense of the metrics that actually matter for growing your business.

Logging In and Navigating Google Analytics

First things first, you need to get into your account. If your website is brand new and you haven't set up Google Analytics yet, you'll need to do that first. But assuming it's already installed, accessing your data is straightforward.

Simply head to analytics.google.com and sign in with the Google account connected to your website's property. Once you log in, you'll land on the main Home dashboard of your Google Analytics 4 property. The interface can look a little intimidating, but nearly everything you'll need as a beginner is located in the left-hand navigation menu under the "Reports" section.

Think of this "Reports" area as a collection of pre-made dashboards designed to answer the most common questions about your website.

The Four Essential Reports Every Website Owner Should Check

Instead of trying to understand every single chart and metric, a better approach is to focus on a few key reports that provide the most value. By knowing what to look for, you can get a clear picture of your website's performance in just a few minutes.

Here are the four must-know reports inside GA4.

1. Traffic Acquisition Report: Where Are Your Visitors Coming From?

This is arguably the most important report for any marketer or business owner. It answers the fundamental question: "How are people finding my website?"

How to find it: In the left-hand menu, go to Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition.

Here you'll see a table that breaks down your website traffic by "Session default channel group." This is just a fancy way of categorizing the source of your traffic. Some common channels you'll see are:

• Organic Search: Visitors who found you by searching on Google, Bing, etc. This is a measure of your SEO success.
• Direct: People who typed your website URL directly into their browser or used a bookmark. These are often repeat visitors who know your brand.
• Referral: Visitors who clicked a link to your site from another website. This could be from a blog post that mentioned you or a directory listing.
• Organic Social: Visitors clicking non-ad links on social media platforms like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), or LinkedIn.
• Paid Search: Traffic from pay-per-click (PPC) ads, like Google Ads.
• Email: People who clicked a link in one of your email newsletters.

Why it matters: This report tells you which of your marketing efforts are actually working. If you're spending all your time on social media but see that 90% of your traffic comes from Organic Search, you know where to double down on your efforts. It helps you understand your audience's behavior and make smarter decisions about your time and budget.

2. Pages and Screens Report: What Content Is Most Popular?

Once you know where visitors are coming from, the next logical question is, "What are they doing once they get to my site?" The Pages and Screens report helps answer this by showing you which pages get the most attention.

How to find it: In the left menu, navigate to Reports → Engagement → Pages and screens.

This report lists your web pages and ranks them by the number of views. You can quickly see your most popular blog posts, top product pages, or most visited landing pages. Key metrics in this report include:

• Views: The total number of times a page has been viewed.
• Users: The number of unique people who have viewed a page. (If one user views a page 5 times, it counts as 5 views and 1 user).
• Average engagement time: The average time your webpage was in the foreground of a user's screen. A higher number suggests people are actively reading or engaging with your content.

Why it matters: Recognizing your top-performing content is a goldmine for insights. You can identify which topics resonate most with your audience, which can inform your future content strategy. You might also discover a forgotten blog post that's bringing in a lot of organic traffic - a perfect candidate to update and feature more prominently on your site.

3. Demographics Details Report: Who Are Your Visitors?

Understanding your audience is key to effective marketing. The Demographics report provides a high-level overview of who is visiting your website, based on aggregated visitor data.

How to find it: In the left menu, select Reports → User → User Attributes → Demographics details.

You can use the drop-down menu at the top of the table to view demographic information by:

• Country: Understand where your audience is located geographically.
• City: Get even more granular with location data.
• Gender: See the gender distribution of your visitors.
• Age: Break down your audience by age group (e.g., 25-34, 35-44).
• Language: See the primary language set in your visitors' browsers.

(Note: For privacy reasons, you may need a sufficient amount of data before Google populates these reports. If you see "(not set)," it's often a sign you don't have enough traffic volume yet.)

Why it matters: This information helps you create a more accurate customer persona. If you discover a large portion of your audience is in a specific country or age bracket, you can tailor your marketing messages, ad campaigns, and even your product offerings to better suit them.

4. E-commerce Purchases Report: What's Driving Your Sales?

If you sell products or services directly on your website, this report is essential. It connects your website traffic directly to revenue.

How to find it: Head to Reports → Monetization → E-commerce purchases.

(Note: This requires e-commerce tracking to be properly set up in GA4. If you have a Shopify, WooCommerce, or similar store, plugins often handle this for you.)

This report shows you a list of your products and the revenue they've generated. You can see things like:

• Items viewed: How many times a product page has been seen.
• Items added to cart: The number of times a product was added to a shopping cart.
• Items purchased: How many units of a product have been sold.
• Item revenue: The total revenue generated from a specific product.

Why it matters: This report isn't just about celebrating your bestsellers. It helps you identify underperforming products that might need better marketing or a homepage feature. By comparing "Items viewed" to "Items purchased," you can also calculate a conversion rate for each product and spot opportunities for optimization. A product with many views but few purchases might have an unclear description, confusing pricing, or poor imagery.

Practical Tips for Reviewing Your Data

Now that you know where to look, here's how to think about your data to get the most out of it.

Start With a Question

Instead of aimlessly browsing through reports, start with a specific business question. For example:

• "Did the blog post I published last week bring in any new visitors?" (Check the Pages report)
• "Are our Facebook ads working?" (Check the Traffic Acquisition report for Paid Social traffic)
• "What was our best-selling product last month?" (Check the E-commerce report)

This approach transforms data from a confusing chore into a powerful tool for getting answers and making better decisions.

Compare Time Periods

A single number doesn't tell a story. Is 1,000 visitors good or bad? You won't know unless you have something to compare it to. At the top right of most GA4 reports, you'll find a date range selector. Use it to compare a period (like "This Week") to the previous period ("Last Week"). This gives you an immediate sense of whether you're growing, shrinking, or holding steady.

Connect the Dots Between Platforms

Google Analytics is fantastic for understanding what happens on your website. However, it only shows you one piece of the puzzle. It can tell you how many people clicked a Google Ad, but to calculate the true ROI, you also need to know your ad spend from Google Ads. It can show you your most popular page, but to understand if those visitors eventually become leads, you need data from your CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot.

Manually connecting this data often involves hours of exporting CSV files and wrestling with spreadsheets. This is where most people get stuck - not in viewing the data, but in trying to stitch it together across different platforms to get a complete picture of their marketing funnel.

Final Thoughts

Viewing your Google Analytics data doesn't require a degree in data science. By focusing on the acquisition, engagement, and monetization reports, you can quickly get a strong sense of your website's performance and start identifying actionable insights to drive growth.

While digging through a single platform like Google Analytics is a great start, the real challenge is connecting that data to your other tools to see the full story. That’s why we created Graphed. Instead of jumping between different tabs for your ad platforms, CRM, and storefront, you can connect them all in one place and ask questions in plain English, like, "Show me a dashboard of my marketing funnel from Facebook ad click to Shopify sale for the last 30 days." There is no need to learn a complicated interface or spend hours in spreadsheets. The answers you need are now just a conversation away with Graphed.